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Flaw in T. Phillips "Digital is not photography" argument



 
 
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  #11  
Old October 17th 04, 10:27 AM
Tom Phillips
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Posts: n/a
Default



David Nebenzahl wrote:

On 10/16/2004 1:51 PM Richard Knoppow spake thus:

[more good stuff snipped]


Everything else snipped as it deserves to be...

Everything you say is so; my point was simply that it will undoubtedly be
possible to read digital images, even from obsolete media and formats, in the
future. You pointed out that it may be difficult to do so, which is true. But
it will still be possile.


I think your point must be to gain gratification by crossposting
so as to take an ongoing multithread dicussion in one nsg group
and limiting it's context in your favor in another nsg.

Welcome to the killfile david...
  #12  
Old October 17th 04, 10:27 AM
Tom Phillips
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Posts: n/a
Default



David Nebenzahl wrote:

On 10/16/2004 1:51 PM Richard Knoppow spake thus:

[more good stuff snipped]


Everything else snipped as it deserves to be...

Everything you say is so; my point was simply that it will undoubtedly be
possible to read digital images, even from obsolete media and formats, in the
future. You pointed out that it may be difficult to do so, which is true. But
it will still be possile.


I think your point must be to gain gratification by crossposting
so as to take an ongoing multithread dicussion in one nsg group
and limiting it's context in your favor in another nsg.

Welcome to the killfile david...
  #13  
Old October 17th 04, 11:53 PM
Bob Monaghan
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Posts: n/a
Default


NASA, with multi-million dollar budgets, couldn't recover much of the data
they had stored on tape from the early space probes (Ranger..). So a bunch
of rocket scientists, with all the $$ and support engineers and software
geeks in NASA, can't recover their own digital tapes 30 years on, right?!
Doesn't say much for our odds for recovery 50 or 100 years from now? ;-)

The first reason most digital images are going to be lost is that most
such images are not recorded on permanent storage media in the first
place. By most, I mean 63%, as found in a digital camera user survey by
Fuji-UK (see BJP PROFESSIONAL NEWS - 21 May 2003 for details), where most
users had images stored on their computer hard drives -with no backups!

Second, most of the remaining images are not going to be properly managed,
meaning they won't be recopied every year or two, or converted to new
formats etc. Like most photographs of the past, those CDRs are going to
end up in a shoebox in a hot attic, and chemical "bit-rot" will make them
unreadable in a decade or less. Magnetic "bit-rot" kills off that form of
storage media quickly too. These losses can be catastrophic in many image
formats using compression, where most of the image is encoded as offsets
from an initial value. Even worse are images with encrypted or protected
or enbedded features. We already have "data archeologists" (seriously) who
specialize in excavating data from older corporate databases and resources

Third, for the few % of images that are recorded on "archival media",
failure to strictly maintain temperature and especially non-exposure to UV
will mean far shorter lives than claimed in the ads. And you may have
noticed that a number of so-called "archival" CD products (e.g., Kodak..)
have been withdrawn or recharacterized for longevity, yes? ;-) This is a
really big deal for digital librarians and others in the data storage biz.
Film remains the only proven archival image storage media today...

Fourth, the number of proprietary formats continues to explode in number
(e.g., raw data), with lots of "streaming" updates in software upgrades
added to products. The number of incompatible file compression formats is
also quite large. The number of operating system variables are large (cf.
XP vs. MS-DOS etc. ;-). And lots of those software programs have bugs and
"features" which may prove critical to recovering or reconstructing the
original data decades from now. So, how many of us have recorded all this
information with our CDs, so we could reconstruct the creation environment
say fifty years from now? None, right? ;-)

Fifth, your experience as a data conversion company worker is different
from mine. I "inherited" a nifty heathkit version of a DEC minicomputer,
complete with software and 8" diskettes etc. The original owner had spent
years searching online and with our campus archivists and librarians for a
service that could convert her original dissertation notes and resources
off the 8" diskettes in some odd freeware word processor format to
MS-WORD. Nobody could do it. Not even the heath user group folks could
help her out That was less than 20 years old hardware and software too,
rather less than 100 years, eh? ;-)

What does Fuji-UK recommend? They suggest that if you have something you
really want to be sure is available archivally decades from now, you
should get it on FILM (!) :-0) Makes sense, since film is a direct access
medium (no computer hardware or software required) with proven archival
potentials (with proper fixing etc.). And the US government continues to
mandate COM (microfilm) as their archival medium of choice etc.

The sad part here is that the very vast majority of digital images being
made by regular people will be lost, not in a century, but at the next
hard drive failure or virus attack (63%..), most "archived" CDROM images
will deteriorate from chemical "bit-rot" in the next decade or so etc.

Just as parents are upset to discover that their VHS tapes of their kids
can't be viewed at the kid's graduation from High School, so to are most
of today's digital users likely to be disappointed that their digital
images are lost over the same double decade time period.

In the meantime, lots of us will be glad we were shooting on film in the
first place ;-)

my $.02 ;-)
bobm
--
************************************************** *********************
* Robert Monaghan POB 752182 Southern Methodist Univ. Dallas Tx 75275 *
********************Standard Disclaimers Apply*************************
  #14  
Old October 17th 04, 11:53 PM
Bob Monaghan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


NASA, with multi-million dollar budgets, couldn't recover much of the data
they had stored on tape from the early space probes (Ranger..). So a bunch
of rocket scientists, with all the $$ and support engineers and software
geeks in NASA, can't recover their own digital tapes 30 years on, right?!
Doesn't say much for our odds for recovery 50 or 100 years from now? ;-)

The first reason most digital images are going to be lost is that most
such images are not recorded on permanent storage media in the first
place. By most, I mean 63%, as found in a digital camera user survey by
Fuji-UK (see BJP PROFESSIONAL NEWS - 21 May 2003 for details), where most
users had images stored on their computer hard drives -with no backups!

Second, most of the remaining images are not going to be properly managed,
meaning they won't be recopied every year or two, or converted to new
formats etc. Like most photographs of the past, those CDRs are going to
end up in a shoebox in a hot attic, and chemical "bit-rot" will make them
unreadable in a decade or less. Magnetic "bit-rot" kills off that form of
storage media quickly too. These losses can be catastrophic in many image
formats using compression, where most of the image is encoded as offsets
from an initial value. Even worse are images with encrypted or protected
or enbedded features. We already have "data archeologists" (seriously) who
specialize in excavating data from older corporate databases and resources

Third, for the few % of images that are recorded on "archival media",
failure to strictly maintain temperature and especially non-exposure to UV
will mean far shorter lives than claimed in the ads. And you may have
noticed that a number of so-called "archival" CD products (e.g., Kodak..)
have been withdrawn or recharacterized for longevity, yes? ;-) This is a
really big deal for digital librarians and others in the data storage biz.
Film remains the only proven archival image storage media today...

Fourth, the number of proprietary formats continues to explode in number
(e.g., raw data), with lots of "streaming" updates in software upgrades
added to products. The number of incompatible file compression formats is
also quite large. The number of operating system variables are large (cf.
XP vs. MS-DOS etc. ;-). And lots of those software programs have bugs and
"features" which may prove critical to recovering or reconstructing the
original data decades from now. So, how many of us have recorded all this
information with our CDs, so we could reconstruct the creation environment
say fifty years from now? None, right? ;-)

Fifth, your experience as a data conversion company worker is different
from mine. I "inherited" a nifty heathkit version of a DEC minicomputer,
complete with software and 8" diskettes etc. The original owner had spent
years searching online and with our campus archivists and librarians for a
service that could convert her original dissertation notes and resources
off the 8" diskettes in some odd freeware word processor format to
MS-WORD. Nobody could do it. Not even the heath user group folks could
help her out That was less than 20 years old hardware and software too,
rather less than 100 years, eh? ;-)

What does Fuji-UK recommend? They suggest that if you have something you
really want to be sure is available archivally decades from now, you
should get it on FILM (!) :-0) Makes sense, since film is a direct access
medium (no computer hardware or software required) with proven archival
potentials (with proper fixing etc.). And the US government continues to
mandate COM (microfilm) as their archival medium of choice etc.

The sad part here is that the very vast majority of digital images being
made by regular people will be lost, not in a century, but at the next
hard drive failure or virus attack (63%..), most "archived" CDROM images
will deteriorate from chemical "bit-rot" in the next decade or so etc.

Just as parents are upset to discover that their VHS tapes of their kids
can't be viewed at the kid's graduation from High School, so to are most
of today's digital users likely to be disappointed that their digital
images are lost over the same double decade time period.

In the meantime, lots of us will be glad we were shooting on film in the
first place ;-)

my $.02 ;-)
bobm
--
************************************************** *********************
* Robert Monaghan POB 752182 Southern Methodist Univ. Dallas Tx 75275 *
********************Standard Disclaimers Apply*************************
  #15  
Old October 18th 04, 12:53 AM
Stacey
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Bob Monaghan wrote:



The sad part here is that the very vast majority of digital images being
made by regular people will be lost, not in a century, but at the next
hard drive failure or virus attack (63%..), most "archived" CDROM images
will deteriorate from chemical "bit-rot" in the next decade or so etc.


I don't even work in the computer industry but have witnessed this first
hand at least a dozen times. People store their digital images on the same
partition as their windows install! They pop in the restore disk that came
with their computer and are shocked all their childen's pictures are gone.
And of course they never printed any of them so they are GONE.

Of course with enough diligence this can be avoided but how many people are
going to take on the active -fight- of keeping all their images safe? I'd
bet less than 5% of digital camera users will.
--

Stacey
  #16  
Old October 18th 04, 12:53 AM
Stacey
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Bob Monaghan wrote:



The sad part here is that the very vast majority of digital images being
made by regular people will be lost, not in a century, but at the next
hard drive failure or virus attack (63%..), most "archived" CDROM images
will deteriorate from chemical "bit-rot" in the next decade or so etc.


I don't even work in the computer industry but have witnessed this first
hand at least a dozen times. People store their digital images on the same
partition as their windows install! They pop in the restore disk that came
with their computer and are shocked all their childen's pictures are gone.
And of course they never printed any of them so they are GONE.

Of course with enough diligence this can be avoided but how many people are
going to take on the active -fight- of keeping all their images safe? I'd
bet less than 5% of digital camera users will.
--

Stacey
  #17  
Old October 18th 04, 01:45 AM
Richard Knoppow
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


"Tom Phillips" wrote in message
...


Richard Knoppow wrote:

recordings.
Now, having said all this basically I disagree with
the
original premise that electonic images are not
photography.
They obviously are despite any argument about longevity.



They obviously are not, Richard, since

1. the process are different and produce different
results.

2. Digital silicon sensors do not and cannot produce a
photograph. What they do produce is a voltage based on the
photoelectric effect. This is then regenerated into
digital
signals that are then used to output reproductions of
those
signals. At no time during this process is there an
optical
image nor any photograph. A photograph is an image produce
by
the direct action of light. Digital does not do this nor
can
it. The physics don't allow it.

3. The ISO standard states definitively digital still
cameras
produce a signal that _represents_ still pictures, not
actual
pictures.

As I've pointed out in my posts in rec.photo.darkroom (now
being cross posted and the discussion deliberately taken
out
of context...), people need to look at the processes to
determine what digital is vs. what photography is. Looking
at the end result is misleading, since in our society the
words photo and photographic have come to idiomatically
mean
any image we see. But as we all well know calendars,
though
we call them photos/photographs, are not. They are offset
reproductions. Simialrly paintings are pictures, but they
are
not photographs. Digital produces pictures and
reproductions,
but there is no original photograph created by digital
imaging.



What is the definition of Photography? I think that
fixing it as a method of producing pictures via a particular
chemical process is not sufficiently broad. Is television
photographic, it is completely electronic (I am excepting
the use of motion pictures are original material, they are
transmitted by electronic means). I think this argument
confuses the method with the result. Digital photographs are
"pictures" as much as chemical ones are once they get to the
finished form.
If silicon or any other elecronic sensors (they are not
digital) do not produce pictures what do they produce? If
you say an electronic signal you are partially right, that
_is_ what comes out of the sensor, but it is not the
_result_ of what comes from the sensor. The _result_ IS a
picture.
Also, "electronic" is not interchangibe with "digital".
ALL of the electronic signals used for digital imaging
purposes represent analogue functions. Even those which
start out in life in the digital domain, such as the output
of graphics generators, are meant to be translatable to
analogue form in order to be meaningful to the human
sensorium. Digital referes to a method of encoding analogue
information in order to store or transmit it. In some ways
digitally incoded information is superior to the original
analogue information for transmission or storage (and in
some ways is not). This has nothing to do with the process a
user goes through. A person using an electronic camera to
produce images which are to be reproduced on a computer
screen or printed on a computer printer, can be a
photgrapher just as much as someone using chemical methods.
It is the production of the image that defines the process
not the means.


--
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA



  #18  
Old October 18th 04, 01:45 AM
Richard Knoppow
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


"Tom Phillips" wrote in message
...


Richard Knoppow wrote:

recordings.
Now, having said all this basically I disagree with
the
original premise that electonic images are not
photography.
They obviously are despite any argument about longevity.



They obviously are not, Richard, since

1. the process are different and produce different
results.

2. Digital silicon sensors do not and cannot produce a
photograph. What they do produce is a voltage based on the
photoelectric effect. This is then regenerated into
digital
signals that are then used to output reproductions of
those
signals. At no time during this process is there an
optical
image nor any photograph. A photograph is an image produce
by
the direct action of light. Digital does not do this nor
can
it. The physics don't allow it.

3. The ISO standard states definitively digital still
cameras
produce a signal that _represents_ still pictures, not
actual
pictures.

As I've pointed out in my posts in rec.photo.darkroom (now
being cross posted and the discussion deliberately taken
out
of context...), people need to look at the processes to
determine what digital is vs. what photography is. Looking
at the end result is misleading, since in our society the
words photo and photographic have come to idiomatically
mean
any image we see. But as we all well know calendars,
though
we call them photos/photographs, are not. They are offset
reproductions. Simialrly paintings are pictures, but they
are
not photographs. Digital produces pictures and
reproductions,
but there is no original photograph created by digital
imaging.



What is the definition of Photography? I think that
fixing it as a method of producing pictures via a particular
chemical process is not sufficiently broad. Is television
photographic, it is completely electronic (I am excepting
the use of motion pictures are original material, they are
transmitted by electronic means). I think this argument
confuses the method with the result. Digital photographs are
"pictures" as much as chemical ones are once they get to the
finished form.
If silicon or any other elecronic sensors (they are not
digital) do not produce pictures what do they produce? If
you say an electronic signal you are partially right, that
_is_ what comes out of the sensor, but it is not the
_result_ of what comes from the sensor. The _result_ IS a
picture.
Also, "electronic" is not interchangibe with "digital".
ALL of the electronic signals used for digital imaging
purposes represent analogue functions. Even those which
start out in life in the digital domain, such as the output
of graphics generators, are meant to be translatable to
analogue form in order to be meaningful to the human
sensorium. Digital referes to a method of encoding analogue
information in order to store or transmit it. In some ways
digitally incoded information is superior to the original
analogue information for transmission or storage (and in
some ways is not). This has nothing to do with the process a
user goes through. A person using an electronic camera to
produce images which are to be reproduced on a computer
screen or printed on a computer printer, can be a
photgrapher just as much as someone using chemical methods.
It is the production of the image that defines the process
not the means.


--
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA



  #19  
Old October 18th 04, 01:45 AM
Richard Knoppow
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


"Tom Phillips" wrote in message
...


Richard Knoppow wrote:

recordings.
Now, having said all this basically I disagree with
the
original premise that electonic images are not
photography.
They obviously are despite any argument about longevity.



They obviously are not, Richard, since

1. the process are different and produce different
results.

2. Digital silicon sensors do not and cannot produce a
photograph. What they do produce is a voltage based on the
photoelectric effect. This is then regenerated into
digital
signals that are then used to output reproductions of
those
signals. At no time during this process is there an
optical
image nor any photograph. A photograph is an image produce
by
the direct action of light. Digital does not do this nor
can
it. The physics don't allow it.

3. The ISO standard states definitively digital still
cameras
produce a signal that _represents_ still pictures, not
actual
pictures.

As I've pointed out in my posts in rec.photo.darkroom (now
being cross posted and the discussion deliberately taken
out
of context...), people need to look at the processes to
determine what digital is vs. what photography is. Looking
at the end result is misleading, since in our society the
words photo and photographic have come to idiomatically
mean
any image we see. But as we all well know calendars,
though
we call them photos/photographs, are not. They are offset
reproductions. Simialrly paintings are pictures, but they
are
not photographs. Digital produces pictures and
reproductions,
but there is no original photograph created by digital
imaging.



What is the definition of Photography? I think that
fixing it as a method of producing pictures via a particular
chemical process is not sufficiently broad. Is television
photographic, it is completely electronic (I am excepting
the use of motion pictures are original material, they are
transmitted by electronic means). I think this argument
confuses the method with the result. Digital photographs are
"pictures" as much as chemical ones are once they get to the
finished form.
If silicon or any other elecronic sensors (they are not
digital) do not produce pictures what do they produce? If
you say an electronic signal you are partially right, that
_is_ what comes out of the sensor, but it is not the
_result_ of what comes from the sensor. The _result_ IS a
picture.
Also, "electronic" is not interchangibe with "digital".
ALL of the electronic signals used for digital imaging
purposes represent analogue functions. Even those which
start out in life in the digital domain, such as the output
of graphics generators, are meant to be translatable to
analogue form in order to be meaningful to the human
sensorium. Digital referes to a method of encoding analogue
information in order to store or transmit it. In some ways
digitally incoded information is superior to the original
analogue information for transmission or storage (and in
some ways is not). This has nothing to do with the process a
user goes through. A person using an electronic camera to
produce images which are to be reproduced on a computer
screen or printed on a computer printer, can be a
photgrapher just as much as someone using chemical methods.
It is the production of the image that defines the process
not the means.


--
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA



  #20  
Old October 18th 04, 07:20 AM
Stacey
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Tom Phillips wrote:



Richard Knoppow wrote:

recordings.
Now, having said all this basically I disagree with the
original premise that electonic images are not photography.
They obviously are despite any argument about longevity.



They obviously are not, Richard, since

1. the process are different and produce different results.


Photography to me is capturing a moment in time. You can define it in a
narrow way so that only your way of doing it is photography. IMHO if what
you display never actually existed in front of the camera, it's
photographic (or digital) art, not photography. But that's my narrow
deifinition. I have some "digital art" hanging in the walls of my home, but
I know what it is...

--

Stacey
 




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